In announcing the nomination of former Washington State Governor Gary Locke to be the nation’s next Commerce Secretary, President Obama said, “We know that business not government is the engine of growth in this country. . . ”
I agree. So, I guess that means he won’t be increasing taxes on business and will reduce regulations which stifle businesses, particularly small ones. And those small ones do create the most new jobs in America.
Sometimes, the president sounds more like a Republican than his predecessor. Just wish, on economic matters, he would act in a manner consistent with such rhetoric.
You can fool all of the people some of the time. And you can fool some of the people all of the time. But you can’t fool all of the people, all of the time.
Bush’s misery index was consistently close to 7. (Some combination of 4-6% unemployment + 1-3% CPI inflation, shifting to 7 + 0 in his last year.) When Obama leaves office, it will be at least 15, maybe higher. By that point, he will be unable to fool anybody except his un-critical, know-nothing diehards like (say) gillie or bob.
Yep, the economy crashed because Obama won the election. No wait, it started crashing when Obama was even running for President. It’s obviously all his fault. I wish I had his power to magically go back in time and destroy capitalism all by himself.
Keep it up. You pessimist, bedwetting, pants pissing chicken littles supply amusement aplenty.
Name-calling isn’t going to help; nor the President’s soaring oratory. If Washington (the whole collective) wants to help small business, then reduce our regulatory burden and provide us with access to credit. As a small business-owner right-now, I have no access to ready credit; it’s all dried-up. Failing residential real estate values have eliminated the small business owners primary means of credit-access; lines-of-credit against our homes’ equity, and home-equity loans. And forget about borrowing against accounts-receivable….
And at the same time, people seem to think I’m a bank; of the $30,000 I billed-out 4th-qtr 2008, I’ve received less than $5000 back…and it’s almost March. “I’m as mad as Hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore…”
The “beauty” of Peej’s comment is that it can’t be related to GPW’s post or to any other comment. (E.g., not to mine) Rabies, anyone? 🙂
I bet you do, Peej. I bet you do. Thanks for the confession!
I wish I had the ability to go back in time and teach PeeJ common sense.
ILC, I would like your thought’s on this info, although I believe it is from one of those exclusive LIBTARD sites:
http://pr.thinkprogress.org/2009/02/pr20090224/
here it is:
“This administration has inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit — the largest in our nation’s history,” Obama reiterated.
INHERITING RECKLESSNESS: “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” Vice President Cheney said in 2002 when pushing for a fresh round of tax cuts. With this attitude in hand, Bush passed on a budgetary nightmare to his successor. Bush came into office with an advantage few presidents have enjoyed — a $230 billion surplus. But due to a $1.35 trillion tax cut in 2001, a $1.5 trillion tax cut in 2003, and a massive defense buildup through the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Bush quickly blew through that surplus. The next president will “inherit a fiscal meltdown,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) warned in February 2008, as the Bush administration projected a budget deficit of $400 billion. After the financial crisis emerged last fall and the ensuing bailouts, Bush’s budget deficit ballooned to over $1 trillion. As Center for American Progress Vice President for Economic Policy Michael Ettlinger explained, budget deficits swelled under Bush because his supply-side tax policies slashed revenues while failing to deliver strong economic performance.
So with this inheritance, where does one begin? I watched Obama last night, and I still went to bed with a big lump of doubt and concern in my gut.
My interest in GP is to explore, listen and learn.
I remember hearing ‘The next president will “inherit a fiscal meltdown,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) warned in February 2008, as the Bush administration projected a budget deficit of $400 billion’ last year.
And that made me wonder ‘how could anyone be prepared to lead the country on Jan 20 2009?’
The crash that led John McCain to suspend his campaign last fall was just an echo. Those in the know, saw this coming long before the crash.
What will bring the US back to it’s feet?
I think it’s a matter of style. For example, should further efforts at refashioning a venal grab of taxpayer loot to call a politcal payoff “stimulus,” The WH could perhaps try adding unmlauts to the title to give it that high tech or pehaps even Hagen Dasz edginess to it.
There! That should do it!
As Center for American Progress Vice President for Economic Policy Michael Ettlinger explained, budget deficits swelled under Bush because his supply-side tax policies slashed revenues while failing to deliver strong economic performance.
That’s hilarious, given this information.
Federal revenue collections hit an all-time high in April, contributing to a further improvement in the budget deficit for the year.
Releasing its monthly budget report, the Treasury Department said Thursday that through the first seven months of this budget year, the deficit totals $80.8 billion, significantly below the $184.1 billion imbalance run up during the first seven months of the 2006 budget year.
So far this year, tax revenues total $1.505 trillion, an increase of 11.2 percent over the same period last year. That figure includes $383.6 billion collected in April, the largest monthly tax collection on record.
And Reagan did prove that deficits don’t matter — when you use them as a means of leveraging economic growth. But economic growth doesn’t come through handing out welfare checks to people and not requiring them to work as the Obama Party demands; it comes from reducing expenses on business and productive people and allowing them to create value.
Obama has never worked for a living. He’s been a welfare ward his entire life, dependent on government funds for everything and harassing businesses; therefore, in his delusional world, the way to make peoples’ lives better is to increase welfare checks and punish businesses.
And just to make sure rusty understands: he insists that Federal revenues were “slashed”, yet Federal tax collections, as my link pointed out, kept hitting all-time highs. That means, despite the cut in tax rates, the Federal government was collecting more in taxes than it ever had before.
ILC, my comment was directly inspired by your immeditaely preceding comment. To wit,
The inspiration wasn’t completely due to that one comment, but if you like I’ll copy and paste some of the more ….let’s say “wet diaper” passages to be found around here.
Ciao!
Obama has never worked for a living. He’s been a welfare ward his entire life, dependent on government funds for everything and harassing businesses [citation needed]
not requiring them to work as the Obama Party demands [citation needed]
Bush because his supply-side tax policies slashed revenues while failing to deliver strong economic performance.
That’s hilarious, given Bush oversaw the slowest economic growth since Hoover.
Like shooting fish in a barrel. Those facts have such a liberal bias, don’t they?
rusty, I have long been one of those who has slammed Bush for his deficits (he should have had deep spending cuts to match the tax cuts), and Cheney for his reprehensible remark.
What’s interesting is that Obama has effectively taken ownership of Bush’s deficits – by “doubling down” on them, and then some. Fiscal Year 2008 would be the last for which Bush was the sole responsible President, and according to the Congressional Budget Office, its deficit was $438 billion. (The 1.3 trillion figure is just wrong, unless it is meant to be a cumulative or multi-year figure.) Granted, if nothing were changed on either the tax side or the spending side, the FY 2009 deficit would surely be larger than FY 2008. And it is now Obama’s job to change that. And sure enough, Obama is changing it: in exactly the wrong direction.
To solve a problem, first you must make the correct diagnosis. The U.S. is overleveraged (that is, bankrupt) at all levels – private, corporate, and all levels of government. What got us here, fundamentally, was:
(1) too many people wanting something for nothing and spending money they didn’t/don’t have, and
(2) the Federal Reserve greasing the wheels with years of artificially low interest rates / artificially high money creation. (they are the same thing, but I’d have to write another essay to tell you why)
We could also talk about specific culprits like Freddie Mac, Fannie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act that led to federal regulators basically ordering banks to lower their lending standards and make sub-prime loans, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, and (again) the Bush-Cheney deficits – but all of those things took place in, or were enabled by, the larger context I just cited. Alan Greenspan bears a huge degree of responsibility for this mess, that is generally not acknowledged. Also and finally, ever-increasing government regulation on the economy (in the name of environmentalism or what have you) has not exactly helped.
(continued) With that as a diagnosis, the solutions should suggest themselves.
– We should cut taxes even more than Bush did, starting with corporate taxes. The U.S. has the second-highest corporate taxes in the world; cutting them would SAVE JOBS NOW.
– To pay for it, we should reverse every domestic spending increase we’ve had since 1999 – or better yet, since 1990 or 1980 or 1970 – reducing the Federal government’s annual deficit to $0 if possible. We should fire masses of government employees.
– We should stop “stimulating” the economy – again, it’s generations of such “stimulus” that created this over-leveraged mess – and let it undergo a painful recession. (Recession is the cure to overleverage and malinvestment: it is how bad debts and bad assets are correctly revalued to much-lower levels, where they can then taken over and used by productive and competent people and companies.)
– We should let interest rates rise to market levels. (High interest rates are good: they prevent overleverage and malinvestment and these crazy “bubbles” we’ve been living through.)
– Most of all, we should stop these insane bailouts and TARP programs that effectively destroy capitalism. When government bails out the incompetent, it isn’t capitalism anymore: it’s a weird kind of crypto-socialism. Letting the incompetent fail is one of the most beneficial and important features of capitalism.
– We should lift regulations, so that entrepreneurs can found new companies and producers and produce.
All these things would produce a sharp recession… followed by an equally sharp recovery. When the U.S. was run on roughly the above system (roughly 1789-1915), it had many short, sharp recessions… followed by massive growth, with real GDP growth rates averaging 40-60% per decade, and it taught the entire world how to be industrialized and prosperous.
No, Peej. I wasn’t claiming, nor saying, nor hinting at, any of the nutty, rabid things you assumed. In other words, your comment cannot be related to mine, in any logical fashion.
I can recommend NDT’s above points. When taxes are fairly heavy to begin with, cutting them raises government revenues, because people are both (a) more willing to comply / pay, and (b) better able to grow – to have something to pay with. Conversely, raising taxes can lower revenues. As President Reagan was fond of quoting: “At the beginning of the empire, taxes were low and revenues were high. At the end of the empire, taxes were high and revenues were low.”
thanks ILC
and NDT
And today’s example of liberal contradiction, by PeeJ:
not requiring them to work as the Obama Party demands [citation needed]
Followed by:
That’s hilarious, given Bush oversaw the slowest economic growth since Hoover.
Notice the complete lack of citations in PeeJ’s post for statements such as these, in direct contrast to the ones clearly and obviously presented in ILC’s and mine and in complete contradiction to PeeJ’s constant demands that others provide citations.
Fail. However, since rhetoric has everything to do with spinning words and nothing to do with actual facts, it should not surprise us that PeeJ is incapable of providing them or actually following the rules he demands that others follow.
As President Reagan was fond of quoting: “At the beginning of the empire, taxes were low and revenues were high. At the end of the empire, taxes were high and revenues were low.â€
The economic term for that is “killing the golden goose”.
What people forget is that government is a parasitic organism; it does not create revenue or value, only drain it. Liberals are fond of saying that “infrastructure spending” creates value for people and businesses; however, what they forget is that those people and businesses are taxed to pay for it. Before it can create any value, the people and businesses must earn sufficient amounts to cover the loss they’ve already taken paying for it.